Sir John Chilcot: a Sir Humphrey for our times

Today Sir John Chilcot was summoned to Parliament to be questioned by MPs about Iraq. In his position, I’d have felt somewhat frustrated, if not hurt. “I wrote 2.6million words in that blasted report. It’s five times longer than War & Peace. I couldn’t have crammed in more detail. And yet you’re still asking me whether we really needed to invade? Honestly – I’m beginning to wonder if you’ve even read the damn thing!”

Frankly, if were him I would have tested them on it. “Mr Twigg! What adjective did I use to describe Tony Blair’s discussions with Jack Straw on page 74, volume five, paragraph six? Come on! No conferring!”

Luckily, Sir John is a more tolerant man than I am, and he submitted himself to the interrogation without complaint. None the less, he approached the MPs’ questions warily, anxious not to be nudged into saying anything stronger than he intended to. He reminded me of an elderly tortoise peeping cautiously from its shell to scan for predators, slowly to the left, then slowly to the right.

Andrew Tyrie (Con, Chichester) appeared determined to make Sir John say that Tony Blair had misled the Commons. Sir John was careful not to put it quite like that. Repeatedly he resorted to a kind of tiptoeing circumlocution, often leaving silence while he considered how to phrase his reply, and never answering in one word when 30 would do. (Perhaps now we know why his report was so long.)

Sir John would leave a silence. “If you place yourself in the position at the time of 2002-03,” he would begin, eventually.

Mr Tyrie told Sir John his answers put him in mind of Sir Humphrey, the disorientingly long-winded civil servant from Yes Minister.

“Oh good,” replied Sir John.

Chilcot: UK did not face imminent threat from Saddam

01:29

Still, after a bit of badgering the MPs did extract a few quotable lines from him. Mr Blair, said Sir John, had gone “beyond the facts” (you or I might say “lied”, but we are not Sir John). The former prime minister had thus undermined trust in politicians.

Or, in Sir John’s typically more circuitous wording: “I think when a government or the leader of a government presents a case with all the powers of advocacy that he or she can command, and in doing so goes beyond what the facts of the case and the basic analysis of that can support, then it does damage politics, yes.”

I wonder whether the MPs offered Sir John a cup of tea afterwards.

“Taking into account the proposal’s merits, including but not limited to relief from dehydration and the mental stimulus induced by caffeine, and setting them against its drawbacks, chief among them my inclination to effect an expeditious departure, my considered view on the prospect of liquid refreshment is that…”